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Writing a Love Scene in the Time of Climate Change

That's my man muse right there. We haven't seen each other since yesterday morning (it feels so much longer, though!) because the progeny and I have been power outage refugees at my parents' house for the past 24 hours. (I earned the right to be a giant baby about this a few years ago, during the Icepocalypse of 2013/14.)

I tried to tough it out at home. There's something invigorating about weathering a storm, emptying out the fridge and stashing the food in the cold garage, stoking a raging fire in the woodstove, piling on furs and holding each other close to stay warm, lighting our home with lovely beeswax candles, and pausing to watch through the living room picture window as the big, old trees of the neighborhood bend and cast off torrents of stubborn dead leaves and broken limbs--listening to the howl and shriek of a windstorm fiercer than any ever before witnessed by a living inhabitant of the Great Lakes region--

And then your daughter starts puking up the very questionable macaroni and cheese from the mall food court, where you went slumming for a hot meal because cooking on the woodstove is easier said than done, and all other restaurants were shut down--but even in a friggin' apocalypse, the mall is half dead, and the macaroni has been sitting out all day, and you wanted to think it would be okay, but it obviously was not, and now you cannot even do laundry unless it is by hand in the bathtub, but your poor, sick child has made a nest of towels in the bathtub because the violence of her illness has made it overtiring to run the seven steps from bed to toilet, and she is curled up there, shivering, because the house is only 60 degrees despite your toiling for hours before sunrise to build a big, hot fire--

Okay, I'm admitting my addiction to the juice. I don't even go camping. Who am I kidding?

Before the mall pasta wreaked its revenge, I actually bundled up in an antique rocking chair with the picture window on one side and shelves of elegantly dripping candles on the other, trying to draft a more satisfying last chapter for my novel, longhand, in a notebook. It sounds incredibly romantic, no?

I have no idea what I wrote. I haven't looked at it yet. My hands were cold, and I only made it to the end of one page. I was sad and lonesome for my husband, as if I'd been in solitary confinement in outer space for a month instead of going through coffee and internet withdrawal for 24 hours in a hygge-stuffed suburban house.

Our power is back on now--hooray, worker dudes pulling all-nighters to do hard, dangerous things!--my phone is charged, my husband is sexting me, and I have written my Friday blog post.

Tomorrow, I'll take a look at that notebook and discover what steamy prose arose from my unplugged, windy pining.

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